the Restaurant at the End of the Universe

This book is the second book in Douglas Adams' cult classic trilogy (of which there are five parts) sci-fi comedy adventure. In this instalment, the gang go for lunch at Milliways, a restaurant housed in a time-bubble at the literal end of the universe (though their journey there is delayed by an unplanned trip to the Hitchhikers' Guide head offices, where Zaphod totally fails to gain any perspective); after this Zaphod and Trillian meet the man apparently in charge of Everything (a superb character and his shortish scene is one of my favourites from the whole series) while Ford and Arthur wind up with themselves surrounded by idiots in an unseemingly familiar place.

Probably read the post about the first one for a bit of context about how I'm doing posts for the whole series.

the Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness

This book by Tim Keller is a potent little* meditation on the nature of Christlike humility, and how we as Christians trying to live faithfully and lovingly for the good of others and glory of God must seek to transcend the whining itches of our own worldly desires: we do this not by putting ourselves down, concentrating on our faults and trying to pull ourselves up by whatever the moral-theological equivalent of a bootstrap is, but by resting in the grace of the gospel, and simply thinking of ourselves less - devoting more mental effort and space to how we can glorify God and serve others. Humility is not something you impose upon yourself, like cold turkey of the soul, but is something that grows naturally in a heart that is day-by-day moment-by-moment reorienting itself to the gospel, which implicitly inspires God-glorifying and other-serving attitudes and actions, and as we grow in this so will the itches slowly subside.
   It's a great booklet, and one I'd recommend church leaders or whoever to pick up a few dozen of to throw people's way when seemly; there are indubitably fuller, more practical, more theologically-enriched books on more or less the same topic out there, but honestly Keller boils it down to its doctrinal essentials here in a work that is simple, applicable, and truthful, and what more can you ask of this kind of book?



* Key word - this is a very short book. One could read it, without rushing at all, in an hour.

the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

This book is the first in Douglas Adams' trilogy (of which there are actually five) of novels based around the radio show of the same name. As I am currently endeavouring to embark upon my own writing of several comedic sci-fi books it seemed prudent to revisit some of my core influences, and well, this is one of those - I read all five when I was nine, and again when I was thirteen and seventeen, and frankly it's been quite a while so they seem pretty fresh to me upon new readings (guess I've read quite a lot of other stuff since), and so it's safe to say I will finish the whole series pretty soon, and I'll save up my more typical reflective passages for the post about the final instalment (as though actual happenings of each book vary wildly, the characters and general themes are the same and should be fairly straightforward to track across all five), instead just summarising the book here.
   And now the point where I realise how difficult of a book this is to summarise.*
   Okay.
   So there's a book called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy which is basically a pan-galactic form of wikipedia, and a roving researcher for it, after adopting the name Ford Prefect and visiting Earth to find out what's going on here, gets stranded here because it's the bum-end of nowhere. He befriends a human called Arthur Dent, but one days picks up a signal that Vogons are on their way to destroy the Earth completely - which they do, but Ford and Arthur escape, only to be caught, thrown into space, and rescued at the last second by Ford's cousin Zaphod Beeblebrox (who is also the president of the galaxy), Marvin the manically-depressed robot, and Tricia MacMillan, a very nice intelligent young woman whom Arthur once met at a fancy-dress party in Islington and totally failed to get off with. Together, they then go off in pursuit of both the people who made the Earth and an answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything.**
   If any of these arrangements of character and plot sound somewhat improbable - don't panic, that's just how the story works. And it does work. This whole series is to my mind among the cleverest science-fiction and outright funniest most inventive popular fiction out there, and utterly indisputably deserving of its massive cult classic status - if this series is alien to you, well, it starts here, and unless you're secretly a Vogon or something you'll probably find a lot to like about it.



* I'm gonna do the summaries for the first four all as spoiler-free as I can reasonably make them, but in the post about the last book, since I'll be doing some more in-depth stuff on the series' overall themes and arcs and things there will probably be a lot of whole-series spoilers in that. Fair warning.

** To which the answer is, of course, forty-two.***

*** It would have helped to know what the actual Question was.

Recreate Your World

This book by Ron and Charity Luce is designed to turn teenagers who are over-obsessed with pop culture into discerning social critics who reduce their unthinking consumption of goods, services, entertainment and whatnot, and start proactively constructively coming up with ways of being and defining themselves as people in God's good world. Now, the actual value judgments underpinning a lot of the argument in this book in my opinion seem to come from a place of dogmatic adherence to traditional norms and ideals - i.e. it is very puritanical, and insofar as it challenges status quo culture it only challenges it in superficial ways and nowhere in the book does it encourage teenagers to critically or proactively think about applying the same radical scrutiny of the values embedded in pop culture to political society at large - but hey, most book-writing American Christian pastors all run megachurches that depend for religio-economic survival on a deformed version of the gospel which neuters its critique of worldly wealth and power, because, duh doy, monotheistic organised religion and liberal-nationalist economics proved to be an incredibly good hegemonic combo - basically it's unreasonable of me to expect this book to be anything less than a philosophically shallow and spiritually half-hearted nudge in the general right direction of becoming skeptical of worldly culture. Anyway, I reread it* because it's really short and, despite my many complaints about it, I'm now pretty sure it's close to exactly the sort of book my fifteen-year-old brother needs to read to puncture his adolescent faith in the Popular - all the niggles and nuances we can try to work out when he doesn't laugh at me for trying to talk about non-fictional non-pop-culturey stuff. Make of this post what you will. I don't really recommend this book, but I am literally bequeathing it to my sibling in the hope it will help him. It may serve a purpose, and its many inadequacies are probably forgivable in that it's meant to be read by teenagers who are unlikely to retain most of it for long anyway.

* Having read it once before as a fifteen-year-old and retained literally Nothing from it, apart from remembering the phrase 'culture zombie' which still sometimes vaguely pops up in the unreliable-haunting-guilt part of my conscience when I'm thinking/talking/doing summat about the kind of pop culture that Ron Luce dislikes.**

** They represent an ilk (sadly not, I fear, a minority) of the contemporary Western post-Christendom church who would genuinely be less offended by a story with persistent and damagingly insidious sexist undertones than by one which uses the word 'fuck'.

the Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents

This book by Terry Pratchett is one I love so much I sort of don't want to write a post about it (same way I was with all the Salingers); it's another that I've read multiple times (not even sure how many*) and has been in storage in my parents' house for the last five years (so including all the time since this blog started), finally being liberated alongside a couple hundred dusty assorted books now that I have moved into a post-studentdom flat with enough space for an adequately-sized bookcase for my ludicrous library - and as I found it in the penultimate box I noted, "that is a brilliant book, I've not read it for like nine years", and bypassing the PURP entirely it went straight to the top of the CRRP*** and by the same time less than 24 hours later (so, nowish) I'd finished it again. It helps that my new flat doesn't have internet yet.****
   You may have astutely got the impression so far that I like this book a lot, but would I recommend it? Yes. Absolutely. To pretty much anyone capable of and open to reading books - there is just a great deal to like; it's an unpretentious classic of modern kid's lit, that can be appreciated thoroughly on many levels (see *).
   It's about a cat called Maurice who has befriended some rats that became intelligent after eating waste from the dump behind the wizards' University, and together with a stupid-looking kid who plays the pipe, they have devised the perfect scam - move into a town, the rats put on a plague, the kid offers the mayor his services for far cheaper than the actual official Piper (who apparently is a scary bloke), all the rats scamper out of town along with him and once they rounded the corner meet up with Maurice to count their gains. However, when the gang descends upon a town called Bad Blintz, there are factors they hadn't predicted: the town is suffering a plague of rats and the Piper has been called for already, there seems to be a terrible food shortage but the rat-catchers are doing well for themselves, a fairy-tale-obsessed girl called Malicia inconveniently befriends the stupid-looking kid, the rats can't find any non-intelligent rats anywhere to be seen, and Maurice detects a dark lingering evil in the air... all of which adds up to an inestimably brilliant conspiracy-romp that is also a powerful, morally-charged story with some fantastic characters. Oh man, I want to read it again already.



* At least three, potentially up to five or six, but before this time last reading was I'm pretty sure summer 2008 (on a family holiday, obviously). I first read it from a school library when I was a keen pet-rat-owning nine-year-old, acquired a copy for a subsequent birthday, and just kept going back to it - because the first time I was only reading it because it was about rats and obviously a pre-teen bookworm with a pet rat will go for that (I even named my third (and last) rat Sardines, after my then favourite character), but even though it's written for a younger audience** it's still just pure genre-shattering Pratchett; hilarious and heartwarming and skewed and flippant and dark and silly and common-sense and thought-provoking and utterly mad yet entirely believable within its own world all at the same time, and there was a simplicity and easiness and real honesty and depth to the story that was unlike anything I'd ever encountered in fiction before, let alone kids' fantasy - needless to say, it stuck with me, and with each re-reading my slowly accruing experience of life and humour and whatnot made the book ever more brilliant.

** Good job too - this brought Discworld to the peripheries of my bookshelves' attention much sooner than the series probably otherwise would have entered it.

*** Pre-selected Upcoming Reading Pile and Currently Recreationally Reading Pile; see here for full explanation - basically I'm just enjoying having made-up important sounding acronyms to dish out on here.

**** "Oh so how are you writing a blog post!?" Alright wise guy, I've taken artistic license with the time-prepositions, and am writing this after wifi's been all sorted out here also after having worked through the backlog of dissertation-season posts that this blog had accrued. What difference does it make? I feel like this is getting banal.

Project Öcalan & beyond

Okay, so this post isn't about one specific book.
   (This is my blog, I'm allowed to transcend its self-imposed boundaries.)

   Basically, as devoted readers will know (who are you?), this summer I've been completing my last and biggest piece of uni work ever, my dissertation [for a Masters of Arts in Global Political Economy], and it's involved reading tons of stuff about the Kurdish Question, and truth be told I've built up something of a backlog - there are currently nineteen draft posts with only the title and date I finished each sat in the backstage-area of Thoughts on Books, sixteen of which were dissertation reading and three which because well I had to read something else recreationally right? Anyway, I'm not confident at this stage that I would be able to do full justice to each book were I to attempt giving them a full-on standard-issue reflective post, but since the bulk of these were dissertation reading, I would like to hazard the suggestion that my dissertation itself comprises a synthesis of my thoughts on not only these sixteen books but the three I've already done posts about as well, not to mention the couple of dozen other books that I only read a chapter or six from and so didn't warrant a post at all, further not to mention the forty or so academic journal articles I also read - in short, if I were to do justice to my thoughts on books about the Kurdish Question etcetera, it would probably be best just to read the actual finished dissertation that I wrote having read them for.

   So here's the deal: I have uploaded it as a pdf to my Google Drive and there is a universal access link below, and the sad backlog of sixteen posts will be dealt with in a relatively minimalistic manner (there is quite a lot that I would like to say about some of Abdullah Öcalan's writings, but since his most theoretically-comprehensive book is also the one that I didn't read [The Roots of Civilisation] as it wasn't as directly useful to the dissertation but I am still definitely going to read it at some point, I'll air these thoughts then). The three non-dissertation books I read over the backlog-accrual period will however receive full and proper attention, post-wise.

   Sound alright?

   Good.

Project Öcalan [or, Is post-nationalist ideology reshaping the Kurdish Question?]

You may, astutely, be wondering what I mean by the addition of "& beyond" in this post's title - well, that brings me onto what I am doing now that, dissertation submitted as of yesterday, I am free from postgraduate academic bondage.
   In previous posts I've occasionally mentioned that I'm developing plans for a big creative writing project - this, I may as well (since I've already embarked upon a post that's not of the typical ilk) now confirm, is a sprawling eight-book series called Selected Earthlings - it's partly dark-but-sincere post-ironic comedy, partly haphazard thought-provoking millennial drama, and partly science fiction; and follows the lives of Naomi Harmony Moss, Amina Nadir, and John Ezekiel "Zeke" Smith across a span of about sixteen years, apart from the books themselves won't be in chronological order. If this tickles your pickle, let me know, as I will probably need feedback from the kind of people who would read that kind of thing.
   Anyway.
   That's what I'll be doing now that I've finished being a Masters student of Global Political Economy.

Revolution in Rojava

This book by Michael Knapp, Anja Flach and Ercan Ayboga, is one I would recommend incredibly highly to anyone interested in feminism, democracy, liberation movements, and politics in the contemporary Middle East - as it is the most comprehensively detailed single book currently available on the astonishing revolutionary developments that have taken place in northern Syria since 2011 (and as the book was published in mid-2016 these developments only became more astonishing and revolutionary since, see). The authors provide some helpful sociopolitical and geohistorical context for the events, and then walk through how the revolution unfolded, remaining formally unaffiliated with either opposition or regime amid a popular uprising that collapsed into civil war, and expanding in the power vacuum, cooperative and democratic grassroots institutions establishing themselves with remarkable speed and organisation to continue fulfilling the functions (producing economic resources, managing regional security, governing, etc) previously performed by the defunct Syrian state. The developments that have taken place there in my view constitute possible the most morally-legitimate popular revolution that has taken place in modern history, and demands to be more widely-known and supported, as its longevity depends in large part on whether established powerful nation-states will formally recognise its autonomy - but more on that in my actual dissertation.

Biji Rojava!

the Roadmap to Negotiations

This book, the third volume of prison writings* by Abdullah Öcalan, was produced as a negotiation document between himself and the Turkish state's military intelligence tasked with talking through ceasefire options with him. It comprises a concise explanation of his ideological system (see other posts about his books) couched in a critical discussion of the history of Turkey's (admittedly very patchy) democratization, and thus generates proactive and reasonable compromises for the Kurdish question in Turkey in the context of the PKK's shifting away from militant separatism toward grassroots autonomy.

   Unlike the majority of other dissertation research books I've done minimal posts for, this one wasn't from the university libraries - I found a super cheap copy at the last anarchist book fair in Sheffield, and have only just noticed having held it at a funny angle against a sunbeam that there is the imprint of some biro writing on the front cover from where someone (a previous owner?) had written an address in Leeds: this is almost certainly meaningless but I like noticing little details like that on books.

   For some reason (and yes I am sure of this I've just tried fixing it like nine times) this post is refusing to justify its text body, which is annoying, but I'm assuming you don't mind having a jiggly-edged paragraph for just one post. For some even more inscrutable reason, this very paragraph has now decided that it is going to justify the text body anyway! Urgh. I don't know.

* He has been in solitary imprisonment on Imrali, an island just off the Turkish coast, since 1999, for being the founder and leader of the PKK - while there, he has written extensively trying to change the wider dialogue around the Kurdish struggle away from separatism toward democratization and peaceful compromise.

the PKK and the Kurdish Question in the 21st Century

This book, the second volume of prison writings* by Abdullah Öcalan, is probably (given its author's personal experience at the origin and around the centre of developments) the best book one could read to learn about the PKK in broader geopolitical, social, and historical context. It introduces the theoretical frameworks of Öcalan's ideas clearly, then tracing a cogent and clear overview of how existing dynamic power structures originated in ancient societies (from the Neolithic up to capitalist nationalism), and also presents his ideology of 'democratic confederalism' as a cohesive response to the historical critique: the arguments he makes are interesting, if not compelling, certainly moreso in light of adherents of Öcalan's ideas working to implement them in Turkey and Syria - and these practical activities are the core focus ultimately, as the rethinking of the PKK could never be merely academic, as the PKK existed as an organisation at war with the Turkish state: its rethinking was a pragmatic as well as moral decision to reformulate strategy to best and most peaceably work toward a resolution to the Kurdish question in Turkey, which (on their side, at least - Turkey still seems happy violently suppressing the crap out of pretty much every Kurdish political organisation, PKK-affiliated or not) is an enormously positive step. Most interesting from this book I think though are Öcalan's first-hand accounts of several major events and developments - these obviously include the international plots surrounding his abduction and illegitimate trial, but also go into relatively detailed discussion of how the PKK suffered severe internal power struggles, from loss of control over tribalist and ethnonationalist elements prevalent among its large and disparate militant body, which corrupted its liberation mission and saw leaders exploiting their positions to effectively conduct organised crime or petty warlording - which exacerbated militant and civilian death rates and attracted enormous military reactions from the Turkish state; conspiracies and fear dominated the party's leadership in those years as betrayals, subversions, infiltrations by the authorities, and such, came to swamp Öcalan's day-to-day concerns while the PKK itself devolved into a disorganised terrorist gang. Interestingly this seems to have changed a great deal for the better since his imprisonment, as the programme of democratization as opposed to separatist struggle came increasingly to characterise the wider party's leadership and was heavily promoted among the guerrillas too. If you read one book about the Kurdish question, it should probably be this one.

* He has been in solitary imprisonment on Imrali, an island just off the Turkish coast, since 1999, for being the founder and leader of the PKK - while there, he has written extensively trying to change the wider dialogue around the Kurdish struggle away from separatism toward democratization and peaceful compromise.

Waiting for Godot

This book, a play by Samuel Beckett, was, to be honest, pretty weird and I didn't overly enjoy it. It's about two men called Estragon and Vladimir who occupy the stage with what is obviously-concocted filler and fluff while they purportedly await the arrival of their acquaintance Godot, in some minimalistic subversion of what constitutes a 'play'. In an artistic sense, no doubt, it is a phenomenal work, one that when it was written shattered so many boundaries and expected conventional norms of play-writing that it can hardly not be called genius - but at the same time, it simply isn't very entertaining. It's like having a big dead fish called Nihilism rubbed slowly against your face for half an hour or so. The dialogue is extremely clever and philosophical, the use of language and expectation as playful as can be expected - but because the play as a whole is essentially an exercise in subverting the very form of itself, you end up with a relatively long thing in which nothing particularly interesting develops and nothing particularly engaging or thought-provoking happens apart from in schizophrenic little outbursts,* like sparks burped out of a fireplace, and if you are used to cultural-creative conceptual subversion of the thing itself by minimising the form of it, then even what made the play so special when it first came out is nothing mindblowing - I live in a generation surrounded by reflexive self-aware forms of media, and so a bit of metacommentary or poking the fourth-wall, sorry Samuel Beckett, just doesn't automatically make something great (c.f. Dan Harmon). Don't misunderstand, I cannot highly enough describe the artistic significance of Waiting for Godot in the history of western theatre, but even plays that didn't come out too long after it - for example, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, did very similar things, and far more (in my opinion) successfully, because the self-subverting form was tied to character and plot that enhanced these elements and made them funny and engaging instead of just an on-and-on display of experimental novelty.



* Lucky's absurdist monologue springs to mind. Moments like that do give the play something of a glimmering substance, but for the most part, as I've said, its content is just emptiness and futility circling themselves in a timeless and poignant and ultimately unentertaining (and not even overly edgy or interesting anymore) manner.

the bricks that built the houses

This book, the debut novel from Kae Tempest (you know, that poet who wrote this), was - well, I'd like to say the best novel I've read in ages, but truthfully I've read loads of incredible novels this year, but seriously, this one is a stand-out fresh one. I acquired it at a hippy-run bookstall at Glastonbury and basically read most of it in two big sittings over a family holiday in a hippy-run cottage in the Forest of Bowland in North Yorkshire - sat with a brew and the dog and a thousand midges on an impossibly comfy armchair on a wooden porch overlooking a small lawn which past a rickety fence is a sheer drop through dense brackeny foresty areas down to a river which I could hear all the while; yes, it was a very nice holiday, even though I had to do loads of dissertation reading during it (and also leave halfway through for a job interview), and this book comprised my recreational reading for it. You don't need to care about my holiday, I'm just adding a little texture as this post will be in the middle of all the super-brief academic backlog ones.
   Anyway - it's a novel about young Londoners: gregarious dancer Becky and her jealous boyfriend Pete and his coke-dealing sister Harry and her partner-in-crime Leon; it's about the adults peopling the families and communities constraining and defining who they have and can become, the deep-running fragility of human need for connection; all characters whose roles have emotional impacts on the main four are explored in bleak and beautiful portrait with astonishing depth and clarity; Kae Tempest has a knack for conveying huge and tiny shades of feeling with a linguistic deftness that will make you laugh and cry and catch your breath in your gullet and sit back slowly with your hand rubbing the back of your neck as you softly murmur 'fuck', and the London that they paints is alive, is dismally brutally gloriously random and messy and gentrified and alienating and home and you get a tangible sense of place and community (or lack of) for the characters throughout: honestly, the plot may be pretty straightforward but it is pulled off with a dazzling, cinematic, heartbreaking and life-affirming prose, and a cast whom you'll know like real acquaintances by the time you finish - all of which add up to make this a bingeable (one up from readable) and supremely rewarding novel.
   Read this if you like Very Good fiction.

Liberating Life: Women's Revolution

This book (available from that link as a free pdf, how good is that) by Abdullah Öcalan is an exploration of the centrality of women's liberation to any complete and internally-cohesive system of revolutionary practice or ideology. Feminist elements have been present in the PKK since its inception, and through the involvement of many women in it and its affiliated organisations as well as the overt commitments of the leadership toward this end, gender equality has become a defining core characteristic of the Kurdish liberation movement, and in this book Öcalan outlines the importance of this in general as well as specifically-Kurdish-related terms. This would be a very highly-recommended read for anyone interested in gender in revolutionary sociopolitical settings and gender in Middle Eastern societies.

War and Peace in Kurdistan

This book (available from that link as a free pdf, how good is that) by Abdullah Öcalan is an overview of the hugely-damaging war between the Turkish state and the Kurdish liberation movement - chiefly the PKK, led by Öcalan himself. He outlines the history, the costs, and the sheer futility of this war, and reignites a call for a democratic and peaceful solution as he tries to explain is workable through mere extension of human rights and liberties to the Kurds of Turkey - this is couched in the development of democratically autonomous structures to safeguard Kurdish communities until such a time. Overall this booklet would be an interesting introduction to the Kurds' struggle and where it currently stands in context for readers whose interest I may have piqued but who may know nothing about Kurdistan and don't know where to start. Probably start here, if that's you.

Democratic Confederalism

This book (available from that link as a free pdf, how good is that) by Abdullah Öcalan is an outline of the core of his political philosophy - essentially the development of post-nationalist democratic structures that do not seek to overthrow or secede from existing states but to operate with complete autonomy to provide security and liberty for those living within their bounds. It has yielded some pretty interesting results in Syria. I'd highly recommend this book to anyone interested in sociopolitical options of pursuing peace in the Middle East, or generally revolutionary pragmatic ideas.

the Kurds of Iraq

This book by Mahir Aziz is a really interesting (and helpful for me academically) in-depth study of ethnonationalism in the semi-autonomous* Kurdish region of Iraq, exploring it in both geopolitical and historical contexts as well as going through a massive amount of data from a survey of university students on their views toward Kurdishness, Iraq, the predominant political parties, tribal culture, and so on.

* I'm writing this before September 25th, so the referendum on Kexit hasn't happened yet.

the Kurds & the State: Evolving National Identity in Iraq, Turkey & Iran

This book by Denise Natali was incredibly helpful to me academically and would probably be interesting to people super-keen on Kurdishness and deconstructions of nationalism. It traces the Kurds' nascent national identity from subordination under the Persian and Ottoman empires to how the colonial powers' establishment of Arab puppet states Iraq and Syria impacted them as a regional ethnic group, fragmenting their nationalism across borders, and thereafter she traces the development of Kurdish nationalism in Iran, Iraq and Turkey, couched in interested discussion of Kurdistan as an inherently transnational space and thereby contextualising the identity of Kurdishness as something that, even as a relatively straightforward ethno-nationalist movement, defies pre-existing nation-states.

A Modern History of the Kurds

This book by David McDowall is pretty much what it says on the tin, and probably the best single source I've yet used in my dissertation research when it comes to comprehensive overviews of Kurdish history across the twentieth century. Would recommend if you want a single book to provide that. For other, juicier or more contemporary, aspects of the Kurdish question, there are indubitably better books out there (as you've probably gathered from this spewage of backlog posts).